Sunday, December 18, 2016

QUIT Day 12

Today’s plan was to go from Ahmedabad to Mumbai with no stop overs.
After the cyclone havoc in Chennai, we wanted to get home as early as
possible.

To save time we had cup noodles as breakfast before
starting. Started at 7.00 AM from Ahmedabad. Zipped through NE1 and
reached Baroda by 8.30 AM. After that it was chasing trucks in NH 48.
There are just too many trucks in this route.

While crossing Ankleshwar, we were hit with the stench of Industrial
pollution. It took us only 10 minutes or so to cross the city, but those
10 minutes were horrible. It is for a reason that Ankleshwar is
considered the most polluted town in India.

We crossed Surat at
11.00 AM and decided to stop for lunch after we crossed from Gujarat
into Maharashtra. A week of vegetarian food was more than enough for
her. After crossing the border RTO check post one of the first
restaurants was a Parsi da Dhabba. She had tears of joy in her eyes.

Vegetarian, if you insist

I didn’t realize that she had missed her chicken dish so much. She even
misread Chickoo milkshake as chicken milkshake. After a hearty lunch of
Chicken curry with rice for her and Roti with Paneer tikka masala for
me, we proceeded to my cousin’s place.

Versova creek bridge
before Thane is under maintenance, so they stop traffic for 20 minutes
one way and the next 20 minutes the other way. We were stuck in that
traffic for 20 minutes at 3.00 PM. She had an appointment to meet her
friend at 6.00 PM but since we had enough cushion, she wasn’t worried
much.

When our turn came to move, I missed the left turn to
Thane and proceeded straight. We had to take a U turn after a kilometer
and came back to the turning. Now they had stopped traffic on this side
of the road and we had to wait for another 20 minutes. There was a
sudden frostiness in the car, and it wasn’t due to the air
conditioning.
We finally reached my cousin’s place at Nerul by 5.00 PM.